Installer Life: A Heat Pump Installation Beginning To End
What we learned from 5 days on a heat pump install.
This is the first article in a series of posts from behind the scenes of a real heat pump installation. We negotiated access to every step of a home being surveyed, designed and then installed with a heat pump. Over 5 long days, nothing was off limits, nothing was scripted, just real life.
Refurb and Retrofit Magazine
To make it more challenging, this was a high stakes job. It was high stakes for everyone: the installer, the homeowner and the renewables company providing the staff - because they were all the same people.
Sean Hogan, has just won the Installer Show award for Best Heat Pump Installer in Scotland. That might sound like good news. But imagine coming home every day after fixing properties from Glasgow to Edinburgh, Kilmarnock to Kinross - but the one home which kept getting missed off the list, was your own.
So yes, the stakes are high.
The problems with disruption, noise, water and heat being switched off. They're real. Every single day, Sean is staying on site.
And the toughest audience he had to impress? They're sitting around the kitchen table after the rest of the trades has gone home.
Heat Pumps Are Easy?
Heat pumps are exciting. Stick a camera in and around all the guts of one, and it's just like a dissection of any electrical product. Wires, gadgets, 'do das'.
Then spend hours listening to experts answering your every question and it becomes much clearer.
Understanding the mechanics of a heat pump is easy. Applying the science of this transformative technology is where the magic happens, and also the obstacles.
On paper, there's no reason why a heat pump shouldn't work on Sean Hogan's house. It's a new build. Almost brand new but not quite.
But as we found out. Sean and his team think that newly built houses are some of the most difficult to work on. Not least because the grand sandstone buildings he spends much of his time installing in, have masses of space, voids and storage.
New builds are tight, cramped and in contrast - we witnessed, full of some distinctly baffling surprises.
The Heat Pump Team
The crew that we followed on this installation are indicative of much of the growing workforce in clean heat and renewables. Carpenter, car mechanic, gas boiler engineer, builder. In the trades, many people diversify into and out of the clean heat workforce.
The one thing that unified them all. They were in demand. Each coffee, lunch break and rest period, constant messaging, planning and scheduling of the next jobs to do.
Not withstanding the cognitive load of completing the work. Not a single day went by where one of the team discovered a niggle.
Pipework that had been buried and turned out to be plastic not copper, rotten units breaking down as they were removed and new model upgrades on gear with switches in different positions - just to make commissioning more exciting.
There was something we witnessed which won't be covered in the install videos we are making. It's implicit, alluded to - hinted at in groans and sighs.
The Toil
With time spent under cars, hauling boilers, lifting wood and generally being pretty robust - Sean Hogan and his team were all carrying the scars of labour.
It's sometimes passed off as hubris. But the hours spent bent round in spaces was hard to film, let alone experience. Units and wiring had to get to places which were too small for cranes and lifting gear.
If we want a workforce to sustain this level of work, some serious investment in making their life easier has to start soon.
We don't want our essential engineers breaking before our units!
The Demand And The Cost
As we witnessed on this site. There is so much demand. So much. It is an incredible feet to watch the professionals juggling each site task, whilst still fielding the admin of future work.
Logistics are critical, Sean has a huge list of reliable suppliers, but even they are being hit with delays and shortages. It's not Sean's job to fix this but it was something we wondered (he could fill the time with other essential work) but on many sites with an increasing demand for installs - what would be the compound effect of supply chain delays?
The team managed these disruptions really well. They are experienced. And that experience was tiered, and at a price.
Amongst the electrician, plumber, labourer and project manager on site they had hundreds and thousands of pounds of qualifications.
Much of what they did over lapped. But the cost of accreditation, auditing and qualifications did not over lap - they just added up.
What You Can Learn
We're featuring full length video content from this project with hours of video footage distilled into videos you can watch at your leisure.
If you're a homeowner you can understand how a heat pump install works.
If you're a retrofit professional who's never been onsite for the whole process, you can see it end to end.
If you're a product manufacturer, you might want to see how telling the story of an install demonstrates the versatility of your products.
What We Learned
Hotel food get's boring over 6 days. No amount of prep can prevent camera gear getting dusty. If you make good coffee at break time, you win that job for a week.
Oh, and social content is part of the job for everyone now. And they're pretty darn good at it...
We'll feature each of the films from site in the magazine. Want to get to see them first? Subscribe here ⬇️. Or you can follow the whole journey on our Youtube Channel.
Access for this project was agreed in collaboration with Panasonic Heating and Cooling Solutions - Europe. We are an independent magazine and feature stories with value, at no cost to our contributors - you can't buy access to this magazine.